DRM is a difficult subject to talk about. Some people call it defect by design or other things.
I must admit myself that I use DRM is some sort of way;
my own CMS Fusion Core is running on a platform controlled by my self.
But I must also admit that I don’t like DRM;
it restricts me in how I use media I legaly buy.
At Whenever.is we don’t use DRM. Our vision is to promote the Asian popculture scene to a wider audience. We are doing this by providing an agenda, livestreams and recorded videos. Our site with agenda is public available and our video’s are licensed under Creative Commons. Which means you could remix our videos into your own production. You only have to put your creation under the same license (CC BY SA) and attribute us in the credits of your production.
For our livestream we are willing to use DRM and here is why.
We broadcast livestreams at so called anime conventions. For our content we have to listen to the content providers, which most of the time it isn’t realy difficult 😛
For concerts it is a whole other story…
We have to listen to the labels, and if we don’t there won’t be a next time since the convention in question will be bankrupt. Japanese labels are realy strict at controling who are recording a specific show, even the Japanese government wants to change that! 😛
Back to DRM, at Whenever.is we are researching if we could broadcast such concerts if we use DRM on our livestream. Yes it will restrict the viewers in some way, but most viewers won’t even notice it.
We will use DRM to broader our range of content we can broadcast, which I think will be a good thing instead of a bad thing.
BTW, we will use the same DRM system that NetFlix and the Dutch Public Broadcasting (NPO) uses, which is Microsoft PlayReady with Silverlight.
I hope this post will make clear how I think about DRM, and why I’m willing to use it.